Only a few hours till we launch the JAINpedia beta-site

Yes, the day we have all been so excited about is finally here, as we count down the hours left until JAINpedia goes global! But as we approach the launch, we thought it would be nice to share what launching the beta site actually means…

The launch of the beta-site marks one of the closing milestones before the website is released as a final version. This means that the website is not completely finished but is quite close in terms of material and technical functionality.

The most important part of beta testing is identifying and fixing ‘bugs’. A ‘bug’ is a case of the website’s not working properly so a website visitor gets incorrect or unexpected results, for example when loading a page or clicking on a hyperlink.

A beta trial is not a way of adding new features to the site. Rather, it gathers feedback from website visitors – often called end-users – on how well the website works before it is finally released. End-users often give feedback on the usability of the website too, which means how useful, easy and satisfying it is to use or learn how to use.

Beta site – what to expect

While you explore this beta website, you should bear in mind that you may come across one or more of the following:

instability of the website and its features

bugs or errors that happen on every page or every time you click on the same thing on different pages

bugs that happen just once

inconsistent experiences with the website, for example the same feature looks or behaves differently on various pages or at different times

times when the website is unavailable

bugs that you have reported already are not fixed.

Although such bugs and behaviours are normal on a beta site, they need to be recorded and reported to ensure there are no underlying problems. When you report a bug, the technical developers log it and begin working out how to fix it. While they are fixing bugs and testing the fixes, sometimes the website will not be online for you to look at. These periods are unavoidable but we will try to make sure this happens as little as possible.

How to feed back

Please use the feedback tabs around the site to let us know if you come across any bugs. Simply click on the red tab on the left of a page to open up the form, fill it in and send it to us.We need your email address so that if anything is unclear we can contact you for more details of the bug you have found.

Please note that all feedback is strictly confidential. If your bugs are not fixed quickly, don’t think that we haven’t received them or that we are ignoring them. All bugs are logged but it takes time to review them and then to fix them. Sometimes fixing one bug creates another, so it can be more time-consuming than expected to fix something that seems quite simple at first.

Finally, we’d like to thank you for your interest and support for this project, and look forward to hearing what you think about the website. Getting this far has taken a great deal of hard work from the JAINpedia team and a lot of other people but we’re very excited that you can now see what we’ve been developing.

This entry was posted
on Monday, December 12th, 2011 at 10:38 am and is filed under Uncategorized.
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